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Yep, in most cases, as long as they are done well. There was a lady on here a week or so ago that was submitting a site map with nearly 250,000 duplicate URLs and in that instance, I would probably say drop it if you can't fix it.

But, in ordinary cases, if your sitemap is well aligned with the pages on your site and if you have duplicate URLs and canonical urls and it only features the correct canonical it can certainly increase indexation and subsequently unique URLs that are sending traffic.

We have also seem some great indexation and results from video and multi page sitemaps.

Another plus point is if you do have problems with pages you submit, you will get some feedback in webmaster tools when the pages show as 'not selected' which again can be a useful bit of diagnostic information.

So, in most cases, sitemaps get a thumbs up from me.

Marcus

Hi Michael Do you think you could expand on your question at all? What are the subdomain problems you indicated? What do you want to rank for? How do you rank at present? If you could flesh your question out I am sure you will receive some good advice for making improvements. Marcus

If you are looking to build a brand  name,  then much of the homepage link building should focus on using the brand identity to get visibility for that term. Couple that with some basic PPC for your brand name to ensure that if people do search for you, they can find you.

Other  than that, without more specifics, it's kind of tricky to know what to say. Can you distil what the essence of the site is down into a  couple of words? Can you then do some keyword research to see if there is any traction for this or related phrases?

If you are thinking that the 2nd and 3rd tiers will be the primary landing pages for  specific searches then I woud really concentrate on the brand name and  message  on the homepage but... if you want to post a link or give a few more details I am sure I (or someone else) can give you a more targeted and detailed answer.

Hope it helps.
Marcus

Hey Dino

Sorry, my bad, I kind of misread that.

Right, there are various options and some tools that can help. It's hard to know the very best way without knowing the industry and keywords your client targets but I would start with those keywords and some basic inurl searches so.

<keyword>inurl:.org</keyword>

<keyword>inurl.edu</keyword>

Then, you can play with that in several different ways. There is a great cheatsheet of search queries here so you need to tinker and see what works for your clients industry.

search-engine-query-cheatsheet.pdf

Then beyond that, the following tools and blog posts make for some interesting reading.

Citation Tools

http://ontolo.com/

http://citationlabs.com/

Blog Posts

nonintuitive-search-queries-resources-for-link-building

21-link-builders-share-advanced-link-building-queries-29848

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Let me know how you get on!

Marcus

Well, there are a few HTML elements that you can use with being the standard for a quote and

being for a quote from another site or source.

With regards to duplication, I am not really sure I have ever come across a hard and fast rule here so tend to think the standard rules apply and if you have a good percentage of unique content on the page then having a few quotes won't matter. That is likely as true if you use italics, q or blockquote.

From my perspective, I would use blockquote to indicate it was from an external source and not worry about so long as 90% of my page was not quoted from an external source.

What you can't do is pinch content from another source and just wrap it up in blockquotes and call it good.

Seriously though, I quote things in my blog posts all the time so keep the unique ratio high and this is not something to worry about.

The HTML quote details can be found in more detail over at w3c schools:

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_q.asp

If you google around this topic, you won't find much, a good indicator that people are not having duplication problems due to quotes and citations else the internet would be moaning about it.

Hope that helps.
Marcus

Hey, yep, simple for sure, but in this instance, just not the right thing to do.

In an ideal world, if you wrote a piece on big yellow underpants then the page name would include those keywords so...

http://www.yoururl.com/big-yellow-underpants.html

But, for the homepage, this is a special case, you have no page name as such, just the URL itself so in the 99.9% of cases where you don't have the keywords in the URL rewriting the / to a keyword driven page (or vice versa) is just not going to do anything.

This is a tiny thing, don't sweat it!

In an ideal world the links to your homepage should be descriptive and help people looking for what you offer to find you. So, most of those would be branded terms then there would be a wide variety of descriptive terms with some having more  value than others.

Re selling your application, what does it do? Is it in demand? is it unique? Does it do it better than the free ones? Are you in a position where getting the app out there and build brand recognition is more  important than generating a few bucks?

There are no generic answers for these kind of questions, it depends on the business and your specific goals.

Hey Jamie

I just took a quick look at the back link profile and it could be a case study for a penguin style anchor text.

Where are the natural links? Where are the branded URL links? It is just so keyword heavy in the anchors that there is no way in the world that it is natural.

Take a look at your backlink profile:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.firstclasswatches.co.uk

Then compare that to something totally organic like say, wikipedia:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.wikipedia.org

Now, that is an extreme example, but that is the point. You represent one end of a spectrum with just artifical, anchort text driven links and wikipedia represents the other end with natural editorial links.

Wikipedia has like the top 20 as URL variations, you have the top 20 as keyword variations.

I did a bit of an analysis of the various penguin analysis's out there and tried to come up with some basic rules for anchor text and yours is certainly a mess. The following is probably worth a read (to save me a bit of typing here):

http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/seo/anchor-text-ratios-and-link-building/ 

This is a five minute analysis but I would pretty much hang my hat on some kind of link penalty or devaluation so it's time to clean house!

Hope this helps

Marcus

Hey,

Potentially, they could be duplicate as the second page is just a subset of the first page. That said, you have already implemented the solution as there is a canonical URL on both pages pointing to the root page with no URL variables.

So, you are telling Google that whilst there are variations of this page the main one is the first link:

rel="canonical" href="http://monsterbins.com/stackable-plastic-bins/4-18-deep" />

This was one of the rare occasions that I can dish out a quick and simple answer that requires you to do nothing and solves the issue.

Hope that helps.

Marcus

The problem here is that those sites are exactly the kind of sites that the Panda and the EMD updates were designed to filter out of the search results and whilst you don't need to make changes to the domain names you will lose additional value from those exact match domains and you need to make considerable changes to the content of each website to make them a unique and valuable search result.

If we look at the first site in the list and take a small selection of text:

"Welcome to the Hampton Inn Denver-International Airport Hotel"

If we google this we get over 30 sites returned using this exact same description as you are using on that page.

If we just stop to consider the initial blog post that Google put out about Panda and what they were targeting I believe this holds much of the answer for you and the approach you need to adopt going forward.

"This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on."

http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html

You need to consider the content on these sites. Don't use content that is copied from other sites and create original content and information that provides value to potential users. Maybe expand on some of the attractions guides or identify other content that is of value to your target audience and use that to help promote the sites and bring people in.

Sorry, I wish there was a simple, easy or even technical answer to this but I suspect you just need to make the content a whole lot better and more unique and you will be okay. Can't promise the EMDs will rank as well as they may have done previously but certainly, there is a lot you can do.

I totally agree with Matt here, work around the edges and think of those terms as the eventual target but you want to be ranking for some modified versions of those before you pour all your effort into those big hitters.

I would sort of work down a funnel (keywords are made up) with each success meaning I am closer to the big hitters:

diesel blue mens jeans uk
diesel blue mens jeans 
blue mens jeans
mens jeans

It's also worth considering that those big terms maybe quite volatile and indicate someone in the browsing stage of their purchase rather than primed ready to buy.

Has this effected traffic or indexation? Does requests from Google results still resolve correctly?

If I follow a link from Google for www.example.com/page1.html what happens?

Ultimately, this does not really matter too much. Just get the www back on the front by doing whatever you need to make that so and also tie a 301 to the non www version so if any of the pages have been indexed without the www then they will get updated back to the single www version.

A canonical URL to the www version would not hurt either.

But, other than that, webmaster tools, your site map, Wp settings etc.

I would do some testing on the site with webbug or some such tool so you can check HTTP headers and make sure that everything is as it should be.

Hey Ewan,

By all accounts, if you 301 a penalised domain to a new domain, you are just passing the penalty along (5h1t rolls down hill) and if the whole reason they moved domain was to move away from an inescapable penalty then 301'ing the bad domain to the new domain makes no sense whatsoever.

If you remove the 301 you will eventually remove the problem. If it was a manual penalty then you may need to submit a reconsideration request (it may not hurt to do this anyway) but the new domain is not broken assuming nothing untoward has been done there.

This is basically a severing of ties, remove the 301 is removing the bad links so whilst you may need to do some SEO to move things forward you will not be fighting a losing battle.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Great responses from Robert and Andy below that pretty much cover a lot of what you need to think about.

I don't know your industry and how competitive it is or your market and how broad that is (local / regional / national / world) so any real targeted advice is tough.

Also, Looking at your budget, you are not going to get a lot of SEO for £750 a month from an established agency. If you want content and links developing that kind of figure is just not going to do the job if you outsource it.

You could consider taking on an apprentice or someone interested in Internet Marketing and wanting to cut their teeth. This way, you could get a full time resource, someone who can tap into the masses of information out there and really do something with it.

If you can find someone who can research and write content and is happy with the more technical side of things as well great but the focus should be on someone who can create the kind of content you need to broaden your scope and earn you links.

There is just so much good information out there that if someone can come into your business, learn what you do and then use that knowledge to create valuable content, big content and promote it socially and via outreach to get links then certainly, six months with an approach like that will benefit you far more than six days with an agency over a six month time period.

You could potentially even use an agency to come up with a six month plan for you with a mind to have an in house

Consider the link bait guide from Distilled. Primarly produced by Ed Fry, a 16 year old intern. It has now earned around 500 links. This is not only a great resource for someone with a lot of time it is also a great example of what can be accomplished with time and dedication.

My advice would be to think about getting an intern for six months. Work with an agency to fashion a plan involving search, social, content, outreach etc and then use your intern to do the graft.

Some interesting reading from this perspective:

http://www.distilled.net/linkbait-guide/

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-online-marketing-with-giant-infographic-11928

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building

In this game you have to be practical and whilst skill and experience count for a lot on the strategic end, you can't get away from the need to do some great work to create the content and then the talk required to get the message out and get people to link to it and all of that takes time and effort.

I go into how to hustle for links a bit more here: http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/earning-links-work-talk-hustle/

Hope that helps!
Marcus

P.S. Avoid the $99 package - that can't be any kind of good.

Hey, it may help a little bit, but if you have little in the way of link popularity then it is not going to rock your world. This can work better when you have a well linked page / post and then link out from that + as ever, the benefit is partially due to user clickthrough on a well ranked article.

You need some good solid content and to leverage that to get some good links to help take things outwards in scope and upwards in rank.

Hey,  check the redirect with webbug to make sure it is giving a 301. If so, you could likely leave it. I would still ask him to undo this and not change your URLs but it will not bring the house crashing down as long as those redirects and canonicals are correct!

Hey Anne

There was a discussion about this a while back:

http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/29063/multilanguage-multicountry-strategy

The general consensus was that there is no perfect way from an SEO perspective at the moment to run a multi language site and that a single domain per country is a better way to go forwards.

If you are going to tackle this you will need to set up new sites for all but the primary language and then 301 redirect the additional language pages on the existing site to the new site. If it's joomla and everything is in a /dir and the new site maintains the same page names this should be easy enough with some mod rewrite wizadry in your htaccess and you should be able to write a single rewrite rule for each language to the new site.

Maybe some canonical URLs on the new sites if easy to implement as well to make sure there is no confusion about who is the owner of the content but the 301's should take care of that with time.

You can then effectively target each language / territory with one site and monitor each site as a seperate campaign.

Hope it helps. 
Marcus

Hey James

It is near impossible to help you with this without a bit more information.

• can you provide a link to the site?

• can you tell us about any link building or SEO you have been doing?

• have you had any technical problems with the site?

There is a chance this is nothing to worry about and it will spring back but it could be a whole bunch of other things but without a URL it is going to be pretty much impossible to help.

Post the URL and will do my best to help you.

Marcus

I have used a similar landing page technique with various content driven SEO jobs. Set up several articles for the long tail and get them doing what they can and then have a more authoritative page that links to the detail page and goes after the big root keywords.

I am currently doing a job in the team building niche and the keywords are all damn competitive yet this approach is slowly building in scale and scope and we are starting to see some results on the bigger terms. No link building or much in the way of external promotion either to skew things just 100% content.

So yeah, I will second that as being fairly solid, if not substantiated and if you handle the long tail versions of your keyword first you are working up towards the bigger and more difficult terms in a structured and manageable way.

Hey, that is not possible with the default settings although there may be a plugin that could extend the functionality.

You would not see any problem from making a change in your permalink structure with the redirection plugin in place and whilst you may have a small bump whilst things switch over, if your URLs are getting crazy long then any slashes and characters you can remove is going to work in your favour.

Your best bet is likely to go one way or the other and personally, if you feel the date elements bring nothing to the table then I would make the change in the spirit of moving forwards.

_* I did come across an old plugin called Advanced Permalinks but lots of folks seem to have problems with it. _